She’d had a little bet with herself, but she lost it. Mark did not pull out an old-fashioned black umbrella with a carved bird’s-head handle from the boot of his Audi. Instead he quite happily took one of the large, cheap red umbrellas branded in white with Chetwood’s latest logo. School branding was one of those things that objectively mattered—those school fees paid our salaries, those parents had expectations—while being completely dire to think about. The current logo was a vague shield shape and a large letter C, vaguely reminiscent of banks and law firms and—most importantly—other expensive boarding schools. Mark twirled the umbrella over his head, unfazed by the rain. “Show me a lamppost, I’ll do you a little dance.”

“No lampposts, I’m afraid. We’re starting by the rugby pitches,” said Walden.

“Lovely weather for it,” Mark said. “This brings back memories! They used to make us play in all weathers. You’d be shivering half to death in your Games kit till the mud coating warmed you up.”

“I remember,” Walden said. “Hockey was more or less the same. We have a girls’ rugby team now, of course.” That was an innovation of the last ten years, amazingly enough. For long decades before that the gender divisions of school sport had been as observed as dutifully as the call-and-response prayers at Evensong. Boys’ winter: rugby, of course, and certainly not football. Girls’ winter: netball—a sport apparently designed on the principle that basketball would be more ladylike if it was less fun—and hockey. Boys’ summer: cricket. Girls’ summer: tennis. The whole thing had always been comically sexist, but it had taken a concerted student protest—boys turning up to netball lessons in borrowed Games skirts, girls tramping down to the rugby pitches—before change had come at last.

“You’re never telling me they’ve dumped hockey,” Mark said.

“Of course not,” said Walden. “Chetwood actually wins at hockey.”

“Did you play?”

“I developed,” said Walden, “as early as possible, a strong interest in netball. If you weren’t A-team material, and you managed to get one of the good positions—wing defence, say—you could spend most of a Games lesson standing still and gossiping with whoever was wing attack on the other side.”